Getting IT to work smoothly is a challenge even when all the parts are in-house, but that's nothing compared with the widely dispersed Internet of Things. Enter Red Hat and Eurotech, which on Tuesday announced a new partnership aimed at simplifying the integration of all those IoT pieces.

Enterprise IoT needs computing capability at the edges of networks so companies don't have to ship masses of data to the cloud for real-time processing. Instead, data aggregation and transformation, plus data integration and routing, can take place close to the operational devices.

Promising better security, manageability and application support for IoT systems, the two companies will offer data, device and embedded application management services.

"This is a logical move in the IoT as both these firms have strong open-source software strategies," said Alfonso Velosa III, a research vice president with Gartner.

Those strategies also are generally complementary, Velosa said, so "this has the potential to help drive IoT solutions and some integration facilitation in the market."

However, for the foreseeable future, most IoT projects will be heavily customized, so vertical industry expertise will remain more critical than horizontal solutions, he said.

"Red Hat and Eurotech will need to pick vertical markets and start to roll out solutions for them to make this as competitive as possible," he said. "They will also need to ensure that the developer experience is as robust and easy to use as possible to encourage developers at system integrators, OEMs and other enterprises to use it."

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Katherine Noyes has been an ardent geek ever since she first conquered Pyramid of Doom on an ancient TRS-80. Today she covers enterprise software in all its forms, with an emphasis on cloud computing, big data, analytics and artificial intelligence.